The NY Times had a travel article about Guyana, explaining how it has risen as a tourist attraction in recent years for naturalists and eco-tourists. It talks about the rich wild life and stunning landscape as well as how to plan your own trip there.

… Guyana is truly off the tourist path — a place, as Evelyn Waugh wrote in “92 Days,” his 1932 travel memoir of what was then British Guiana, “of conflicting cultures and states of development where ideas, uprooted from their traditions, become oddly changed in transplantation.”

Nestled between Venezuela, Brazil and Suriname, Guyana — South America’s only English-speaking country — is a place that rarely registers as a vacation spot. In recent years, however, the country has started pushing to capitalize on its often stunning scenery, abundant wildlife and rich Amerindian heritage, repackaging itself as a haven for adventurers, naturalists and eco-tourists.

… Once in the interior, you can forget any ideas of rambling off on your own, thanks to a lack of roads and often limited accommodations and food supplies in the rural villages. (And don’t even think about visiting the rain forests without a local guide, unless you are fully prepped in the niceties of dealing with caiman, black widow spiders and armadillo wasps.)

This isolation, though, has resulted in the emergence of eco-lodges across the country, built with the help of both foreign aid and Amerindian knowledge — meaning that visitors get in-depth, personal, insider perspectives. In Surama, where we stayed, a tiny Macushi village of about 300 inhabitants set in a five-square-mile patch of open savannah in the northern Rupununi, two four-bed eco-lodges have drawn a steady stream of visitors. (Built in 2004 as part of a sustainable tourism initiative between Guyana and the United States, the lodges are now managed and operated by the local Macushi tribe.)

Follow the rest of the article here.